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Like A Word, A Sound, A Song
- Gemsong, the true language of Gems, having the capacity to be a Brown Note to organic life.
- Steven's body slows down so much when he sleeps he becomes practically indistinguishable from a corpse.
- Steven has Rose's memories. All of them. Going back for eons. And sometimes can't tell that the memories aren't his.
- This aged him mentally by millions of years.
- Steven has claws. Pretty neat, right? He has at least twenty more bones than the baseline human in order to accommodate them.
Beware, Therefore, The Gemini.
- It's implied that Steven had a PTSD-related episode the previous night, which caused him to mentally split apart into Sten and Vendan. Vendan is left an absolute wreck, piloting Steven's body is a near-delirious attempt at a Heroic Safe Mode while trying to find his "brother", with Sten trapped in their mind in an equally desperate attempt to find Vendan, unable to see, hear, or move.
- Greg sees his son- feverish, disheveled, barely coherent- and asks Steven what's wrong. His "son's" response?
- Readers finally get to see Sten and Vendan from the perspective of someone other than Connie or Steven himself. Vendan is a blank, eerie ghost of a Gem and Sten is more "humanoid" than "human".
- Pink Diamond does not exist. Rose Quartz does not exist. She does not exist.
- Vendan bluntly stating that being unfused is little more than shattered.
- Steven flatly recalling how White Diamond tore out his Gem.
A Love Affair, But Exit Left
- Steven having Fertile Blood that grows healing flowers is kind of cool, but it still highlights how much of a Humanoid Abomination he actually is under the surface.
- Chapters 7-9, which take place during the SU:F episode Fragments
. Readers get to watch in slow motion Jasper's deliberate efforts to groom Steven into being her idea of the Diamond he should have been all along, knowing full well what happens to her as a result.- Chapter 10- I Can't Breathe, which is implied to be the viewpoint of Jasper's shattered fragments. The narration slowly gets more disjointed, switching between third and first person, and then starts to repeat itself like a broken record, culminating in a Madness Mantra that bleeds into the author's notes and even the chapter title itself.
- Steven accidentally fuses with Jasper. While Carnelian herself is rather... jarring on her own, perhaps the creepiest part of the chapter is one throwaway line. Carnelian had apparently awoken more of Pink's memories in Steven, and when they unfuse, Steven starts deliriously rambling about eating a star… four billion years ago.
Diamond Drop
- The events of Thor, from the outside perspective of the Gem empire, looked a lot like an Asgardian declaration of war. As readers pointed out, Asgard is extremely lucky that Steven was willing to investigate further and try to resolve things peacefully.
- "Asteria Diamond", aka Steven, is very unsettling in-universe from an outsider's perspective. The narrative never allows the reader to forget that as much of a Nice Guy he is, he's still a literal alien God-Emperor and the face of an immortal, intergalactic empire.
- Steven's flagship, the Tāmarai, which looks like a giant eldritch Space Whale.
- The slowly building implication that Odin abused all of his children, just in different ways.
Godspeed You Stargirl, You Paladin Amongst Peons
- Connie starts having mild separation anxiety over a recently acquired pet goldfish, starting to imagine all the horrible things that could happen to it while she's not home. But then the scenarios start getting more specific, and it becomes clear that she's not talking about a goldfish anymore- she's talking about Steven.
The Professor In AD-1-21
- Bruce Banner is not having a good time after being Hulked out for a week straight post-Harlem fight. He spends a whole other week stranded in the wilderness, with his physical and mental condition deteriorating. After the second day, he starts seeing ghosts. Though the author notes that the Bruce/Hulk of the comics could canonically see ghosts and astral forms, his feverish mental state and poor health calls the narrative into question.
Three Can Keep A Secret, If Two Of Them Are Dead
Like Halley's Comet
- Essentially all of time has become But for Me, It Was Tuesday for Steven. In his own words, "a day is a decade is a century".
